Novalis Aphorisms (1798-1800) 1

APHORISMS
by NOVALIS
(Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg), 1772 - 1801
TRANSLATED BY FREDERIC H. HEDGE


Aus den Notizen 1798:

Die Welt mu romantisirt werden. So findet man
den urspr[nglichen] Sinn wieder. [] Indem ich
dem Gemeinen einen hohen Sinn, dem Gewhnlichen
ein geheimnivolles Ansehen, dem Bekannten die
Wrde des Unbekannten, dem Endlichen einen
unendlichen Schein gebe so romantisire ich es

Where no gods are, specters rule.

The best thing that the French achieved by their Revolution,
was a portion of Germany.

Germany is genuine popularity, and therefore an ideal.

Where children are, there is the golden age.

Spirit is now active here and there: when will Spirit be active
in the whole? When will mankind, in the mass, begin to consider?

Nature is pure Past, foregone freedom; and therefore, throughout, the soil of history.

The antithesis of body and spirit is one of the most remarkable and dangerous of all
antitheses. It has played an important part in history.

Only by comparing ourselves, as men, with other rational beings, could we know what we
truly are, what position we occupy.

The history of Christ is as surely poetry as it is history. And, in general, only that history is
history which might also be fable.

The Bible begins gloriously with Paradise, the symbol of youth, and ends with the
everlasting kingdom, with the holy city. The history of every man should be a Bible.

Prayer is to religion what thinking is to philosophy. To pray is to make religion.

The more sinful man feels himself, the more Christian he is.

Christianity is opposed to science, to art, to enjoyment in the proper sense.
Novalis Aphorisms (1798-1800) 2


It goes forth from the common man. It inspires the great majority of the limited on earth.

It is the germ of all democracy, the highest fact in the domain of the popular.

Light is the symbol of genuine self-possession. Therefore light, according to analogy, is the
action of the self-contact of matter. Accordingly, day is the consciousness of the planet, and
while the sun, like a god, in eternal self-action, inspires the center, one planet after another
closes one eye for a longer or shorter time, and with cool sleep refreshes itself for new life
and contemplation. Accordingly, here, too, there is religion. For is the life of the planets
aught else but sun-worship?

The Holy Ghost is more than the Bible. This should be our teacher of religion, not the dead,
earthly, equivocal letter.

All faith is miraculous, and worketh miracles.

Sin is indeed the real evil in the world. All calamity proceeds from that. He who
understands sin, understands virtue and Christianity, himself and the world.

The greatest of miracles is a virtuous act.

If a man could suddenly believe, in sincerity, that he was moral, he would be so.

We need not fear to admit that man has a preponderating tendency to evil. So much the
better is he by nature, for only the unlike attracts.

Everything distinguished (peculiar) deserves ostracism. Well for it if it ostracizes itself.
Everything absolute must quit the world.

A time will come, and that soon, when all men will be convinced that there can be no king
without a republic, and no republic without a king; that both are as inseparable as body and
soul. The true king will be a republic, the true republic a king.

In cheerful souls there is no wit. Wit shows a disturbance of the equipoise.

Most people know not how interesting they are, what interesting things they really utter. A
true representation of themselves, a record and estimate of their sayings, would make them
astonished at themselves, would help them to discover in themselves an entirely new
world.

Man is the Messiah of Nature.

The soul is the most powerful of all poisons. It is the most penetrating and diffusible
stimulus.

Novalis Aphorisms (1798-1800) 3

Every sickness is a musical problem; the cure is the musical solution.

Inoculation with death, also, will not be wanting in some future universal therapy.

The idea of a perfect health is interesting only in a scientific point of view. Sickness is
necessary to individualization.

If God could be man, he can also be stone, plant, animal, element, and perhaps, in this way,
there is a continuous redemption in Nature.

Life is a disease of the spirit, a passionate activity. Rest is the peculiar property of the spirit.
From the spirit comes gravitation.

As nothing can be free, so, too, nothing can be forced, but spirit.

A space-filling individual is a body; a time-filling individual is a soul.

It should be inquired whether Nature has not essentially changed with the progress of
culture.

All activity ceases when knowledge comes. The state of knowing is eudemonism, blest
repose of contemplation, heavenly quietism.

Miracles, as contradictions of Nature, are amathematical. But there are no miracles in this
sense. What we so term, is intelligible precisely by means of mathematics; for nothing is
miraculous to mathematics.

In music, mathematics appears formally, as revelation, as creative idealism. All enjoyment is
musical, consequently mathematical. The highest life is mathematics.

There may be mathematicians of the first magnitude who cannot cipher. One can be a great
cipherer without a conception of mathematics.

Instinct is genius in Paradise, before the period of self-abstraction (self-recognition).

The fate which oppresses us is the sluggishness of our spirit. By enlargement and
cultivation of our activity, we change ourselves into fate. Everything appears to stream in
upon us, because we do not stream out. We are negative, because we choose to be so; the
more positive we become, the more negative will the world around us be, until, at last, there
is no more negative, and we are all in all. God wills gods.

All power appears only in transition. Permanent power is stuff.

Every act of introversion--every glance into our interior--is at the same time ascension,
going up to heaven, a glance at the veritable outward.

Novalis Aphorisms (1798-1800) 4

Only so far as a man is happily married to himself, is he fit for married life and family life,
generally.

One must never confess that one loves one's self. The secret of this confession is the life-
principle of the only true and eternal love.

We conceive God as personal, just as we conceive ourselves personal. God is just as
personal and as individual as we are; for what we call I is not our true I, but only its off
glance.

Internet Quotes Aphorisms culled from aggregator:
http://www.qotd.org/search/search.html?aid=5222

Life must not be a novel that is given to us, but one that is made by us.

Love is the final end of the world's history, the Amen of the universe.

Man is a Sun; his Senses are the Planets.
- cited in Thomas Carlyle (1829)

Man is the higher Sense of our Planet; the star which connects it with the upper world; the
eye which it turns towards Heaven.
- cited in Thomas Carlyle (1829)

Most observers of the French Revolution, especially the clever and noble ones, have
explained it as a life-threatening and contagious illness.
- Blthenstaub-Fragmente [Pollen and Fragments] (1798)

Nature is a petrified magic city.

Nothing is more indispensable to true religiosity than a mediator that links us with
divinity.
- Blthenstaub-Fragmente [Pollen and Fragments] (1798)

One should, when overwhelmed by the shadow of a giant, move aside and see if the
colossal shadow isn't merely that of a pygmy blocking out the sun.

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

Only as far as a man is happily married to himself is he fit for married life and family life in
general.

Our life is no Dream, but it may and will perhaps become one.
- cited in Thomas Carlyle (1829)

Perceptibility is a kind of attentiveness.
Novalis Aphorisms (1798-1800) 5


Philosophy can bake no bread; but she can procure for us God, Freedom, Immortality.
Which, then, is more practical, Philosophy or Economy?
- cited in Thomas Carlyle (1829)

Philosophy is properly Home-sickness; the wish to be everywhere at home.
- cited in Thomas Carlyle (1829)

Philosophy is really nostalgia, the desire to be at home.

Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.

The art of writing books is not yet invented. But it is at the point of being invented.
Fragments of this nature are literary seeds. There may be many an infertile grain among
them: nevertheless, if only some come up!
- Blthenstaub-Fragmente [Pollen and Fragments] (1798)

The artist belongs to his work, not the work to the artist.

The artist stands on the human being as a statue does on a pedestal.

The best thing about the sciences is their philosophical ingredient, like life for an organic
body. If one dephilosophizes the sciences, what remains left? Earth, air, and water.
- Blthenstaub-Fragmente [Pollen and Fragments] (1798)

The world must be romanticized. In this way the originary meaning may be found again.

There are ideal series of events which run parallel with the real ones. They rarely coincide.
Men and circumstances generally modify the ideal train of events, so that it seems
imperfect, and its consequences are equally imperfect. Thus with the Reformation; instead
of Protestantism came Lutheranism.

There is but one Temple in the World; and that is the Body of Man.
- cited in Thomas Carlyle (1829)

To become properly acquainted with a truth, we must first have disbelieved it, and
disputed against it.
- cited in Thomas Carlyle (1829)

To get to know a truth properly, one must polemicize it.


To philosophize means to make vivid.

To romanticize the world is to make us aware of the magic, mystery and wonder of the
world; it is to educate the senses to see the ordinary as extraordinary, the familiar as
Novalis Aphorisms (1798-1800) 6

strange, the mundane as sacred, the finite as infinite.

True anarchy is the generative element of religion. Out of the annihilation of all existing
institutions she raises her glorious head, as the new foundress of the world..

We are more closely connected to the invisible than to the visible.

We are near waking when we dream we are dreaming.
- cited in Thomas Carlyle (1829)

We are on a mission: we are called to the cultivation of the earth.
- Blthenstaub-Fragmente [Pollen and Fragments] (1798)

We dream of journeys through the cosmos Is the cosmos not then in us? We do not know
the depths of our own spirit. The mysterious path leads within. In us, or nowhere, is
eternity with its worlds the past and the future.
- Blthenstaub-Fragmente [Pollen and Fragments] (1798)

We dream of travels throughout the universe: is not the universe within us? We do not
know the depths of our spirit. The mysterious path leads within. In us, or nowhere, lies
eternity with its worlds, the past and the future.
- Blthenstaub-Fragmente [Pollen and Fragments] (1798)

We never completely comprehend ourselves, but we can do far more than comprehend.

We touch Heaven, when we lay our hand on a human body.
- from Thomas Carlyle "" (1829)

Where are we really going? Always home.

Where children are, there is a golden age.
- Blthenstaub-Fragmente [Pollen and Fragments] (1798)

Where no gods are, specters rule.

A character is a completely fashioned will.

A hero is one who knows how to hang on one minute longer.


Building worlds is not enough for the deeper urging mind; but a loving heart sates the
striving spirit.
- Blthenstaub-Fragmente [Pollen and Fragments] (1798)

Character and fate are two words for the same thing.

Novalis Aphorisms (1798-1800) 7

Christianity is the root of all democracy, the highest fact in the rights of men.

Every beloved object is the center point of a paradise.
- Blthenstaub-Fragmente [Pollen and Fragments] (1798)

Everywhere we seek the Absolute, and always we find only things.
- Blthenstaub-Fragmente [Pollen and Fragments] (1798)

Friends, the soil is poor, we must sow seeds in plenty for us to garner even modest
harvests.
- Blthenstaub-Fragmente [Pollen and Fragments] (1798)

Humanity is a comic role.

I often feel, and ever more deeply I realize, that fate and character are the same conception.

I was still blind, but twinkling stars did dance
Throughout my being's limitless expanse,
Nothing had yet drawn close, only at distant stages
I found myself, a mere suggestion sensed in past and future ages.

Knowledge is only one half. Faith is the other.

Language is the dynamics of the spiritual realm. One word of command moves armies; the
word Liberty entire nations.
- Blthenstaub-Fragmente [Pollen and Fragments] (1798)

Learning is pleasurable but doing is the height of enjoyment.

Life is a disease of the spirit; a working incited by Passion. Rest is peculiar to the spirit.
- cited in Thomas Carlyle "" (1829)